God (not my usual God) made it quite clear to me whilst I was scrolling obsessively through acres of men who look like pedophiliac geography teachers… he made it perfectly clear that a life of abstinent solitude was probably on the cards or (if I was really lucky) being violently murdered by a crazy sex therapist or… luckier… a hit man sent by some crazier ex.

Which brings me illogically to:

Bradley Manning. My hero. What can I say? This courageous young man has revealed not only international truths triggering the Arab Spring and a hasty retreat from Iraq by the USA… but the truth about American, white gay men.

Fuck me. What a bunch of crazy, right-wing cock suckers.

I mean… these gay white guys are voting Democrat, so they get their miserable marriage equality then… as soon as they do… they’ll jump ship and vote Republican… if they aren’t already.

Gay White Men won’t feel like they are part of any minority once they achieve parity with their straight white male colleagues.

Their ‘heroes’ are prescribed by good looking GLAAD president Herndon Graddick and his ilk. Heroes? A GLAAD ‘hero’ is anyone who comes out of the closet or a celebrity who says publicly that they like gay people.

Herndon Graddick? Consider the source.

You know what, Bradley? The last time I saw Herndon (fascist star-fucker) he was sobbing in a gay AA meeting because he can’t stop doing meth.

The time before that I saw Herndon he was at gay traitor Ken Mehlman’s drinks party with his forked tongue shoved so far up Ken’s ass what he pulled out was scarcely chewed.

Bradley, you were very brave.

Most of the gays I know in LA and NYC are the kind of men who stayed close to the teacher at school because they lived in fear.

Fear has shaped their lives.

They are scared of you. They used to be scared of radical homosexual Peter Tatchell. Before Elton brought him in from the cold.

Bradley, you didn’t come from an affluent family, you’re not a great looker. You might not even be a man… that’s what they say.

But who ever you are, you are my hero. You made me rethink, reshape my life. Redefine myself as queer rather than gay… and I thank you for that… again. Because without you… things might have remained confusing for me.

But now… they’re not.

The story of S.F. Pride versus Bradley Manning and S.F. Pride versus the activist community of San Francisco is an ugly one that illumines the maggoty underside of assimilationist politics and policies. In the quest for straight acceptance that has propelled the LGBT community headlong into the arms of two of the most historically repressive institutions, marriage and the military, dissent has become anathema. The values of ads that used to pepper the personals in queer newspapers and magazines “seeking straight-looking, straight-acting, no fats, no fems” have become internalized within the community. The controversy over Manning highlights what has happened in the juggernaut move toward equality — there’s no room for outliers. Either you are a Lisa Williams-style straight-acting, straight-looking martinet with no temper for dissent or you are like the people who signed the complaint — activists all — who recognize that our queer story is not going to be told simply through marriage equality and being able to enlist openly in the military. Marriage and military equality are important, but they aren’t our only issues. Manning took the actions he did because of his outrage over DADT, which was still in effect throughout his deployment. But he also acted like so many patriots have over our nation’s history — out of loyalty to American democracy. Manning thought the government was lying to the people. So he told them the truth.

VICTORIA A. BROWNWORTH is a Pulitzer Prize-nominated journalist who has won the NLGJA and Society of Professional Journalists Awards for her series on LGBT issues. She is the author and editor of more than 30 books, including the award-winning Too Queer: Essays From a Radical Life. She lives in Philadelphia. Find her on Twitter at @VABOX.

Meeting you once. That was enough. I don’t need any more chaos in my life. That’s what a moment with you was. Whoever you are. Was that your real name? Did I tell you my real name. Isn’t that the point?

A community of liars, reinventing themselves for a wet, dark moment under the covers.

That’s what they don’t want you to know. So many lies they tell. They want you to believe we just are like you. We are just like you behind the elegant front door.

The bronze gargoyle.

No women to temper our worst excesses.

Dawn.

Again.

Those yellow, silk satin curtains were bought for me by Jean Paul Gaultier on Nothing Hill the day after the IRA blew up the City of London. They are pretty threadbare at the edges.

I don’t care.

He picked me up at the Market Tavern in Vauxhall. He sent the bar man over with a pint. Paid for. Caught my attention. I had no intention of kissing him. Making love to him. Instead I took him to the crater in the City of London where the Irish Republican Army had blown up the streets.

Certain that no one would believe the story. Still very drunk. A pall over my forehead. We sat in Tim’s kitchen so I could, at a later date, prove that we had been there. I sat my god daughter on my lap. My jeans must have stunk of beer and cigarettes and sweat.

I think he was probably into fisting.

I can feel it. You are falling in love with me but I’m not interested. I can’t pretend. I can’t love you back. You may as well back away from the beloved. As you know, there’s a viper beneath the skin. Your weakness disgusts me. Those eyes looking up at me expecting so much more. Those big brown eyes offending me. I imagine pushing you down the stairs.

Visitors: from England. My home town. I think you forget that my home town will always be there. Always. The softer landing. Regardless what you do to me. What you take from me. How you silence me. The months are passing quickly.

Savages, blowing up there own people. Blaming the boys. The muslim boys. Demonizing islam.

It’s a drill… wait… no it’s not. There is a third bomb… wait no there isn’t. We’re looking for a dark skinned man… wait… actually two white ones. We need help identifying them… wait we’ve had one of them on a list for years and we know where he lives. Ok, we found them but we killed one… no wait his brother killed him… wait… no he didn’t. We captured the other one after a firefight but he shot himself… wait… he didn’t have a gun.

Savages, without opera. Savages, white and clean. Chained to their guns and their christianity. The lies they tell: the deficit. The heroes they claim. The heroes they abandon.

The gays are picking out their black shirts, their golden hair and musculature.

Being in jail radicalized me. Hanging with the Trans hookers. No longer gay. This queer, with other queers. Behind the women and men of colour, of indeterminate physicality. Liberty leading the people.

There is so much outraged. Outrage! A line has to be drawn. Robby, my darling ally. Now he is Dustin Lance Black‘s boyfriend, well… he had to be jettisoned. The trophy boyfriend.

I really loved him. Like a son.

There he is with the gays (black and white) at the White House. Looking uncomfortable. His hair slicked back. His beautiful flaxen hair.

Meanwhile his ‘husband’ Lance Black, is a grand marshall/special guest star/nazi youth at San Francisco Pride. The same organisation that abandoned Bradley Manning last week. Turned their back on a world hero in favor of an illusionist.

Lance is a man who writes about history rather than participates in it.

A bunch of Iraq gay vets (murderers/terrorists) took it upon themselves to complain and the corporate Pride org buckled.

It was a sad day. A terrible, sad day.

One day films will be made about Bradley Manning and we will wonder, with a degree of homo incredulity, how Lance Black and the organizers of SanFrancisco Pride found themselves on the wrong side of history.

Hairless, blond Lance with his hairless, limp, blond husband.

So the argument rages. Is Bradley manning a hero? It seems that if he is… not many gay people agree. He broke the law they caw!

In no case shall information be classified… in order to: conceal violations of law, inefficiency, or administrative error; prevent embarrassment to a person, organization, or agency… or prevent or delay the release of information that does not require protection in the interest of the national security.

Thus, what Bradley Manning did when he disclosed cables that revealed extreme corruption and major breaches of diplomatic goodwill was, in fact, quite honorable, and he deserves protection under the Whistleblower Protection Act.

My friend Robby is part of a homosexual elite. Able to shape and destroy lives.

The bitter and resentful gays turning on their own. They daren’t turn on straight people. Why? They still want to be straight.

Meanwhile a black man comes out and the gay, white elite are thrilled. It’s embarrassing that they have no black friends. It’s embarrassing that they have no black friends on Facebook.

Thank God! A black man, playing basket ball. He’s making it seem so comfortable.

Fuck HRC. Fuck GLAAD.

I am understanding now. Who those gays are. They never wanted to put up their hand and tell the world they were different. I did. They wanted to be teachers pet. I didn’t. They wanted to be perfect. Nope, not me.

Their only act of bravery is telling the world they are gay.

Astonishing. These absurd gay men screaming about how Bradley Manning broke the law. We who were born criminals… born gay, who every time we kissed or made love also broke the law. Would you have suggested abstinence until the laws magically changed? Did we deserve to go to jail for being gay, after all… we knew the consequences? Who do you think broke the law on your behalf to fight police and break windows at Stonewall? Sadly. it turns out, not many gay men. They were hiding in the back of the bar whilst the trannies broke the law. The gays are still hiding in the back of the bar whilst honorable men like Bradley Manning fight important battles against iniquity and injustice. By dissing Manning you merely collude with, support the illegal actions of the US military. Make your choice, but remember those of us who fought on your behalf once upon a time did so without regard for the law. Bradley Manning may or may not have broken laws. Without doubt, his actions helped liberate millions and hastened a US military withdrawal from Iraq. You must honor him.

Let’s face it. It wasn’t gay men fighting the police and breaking windows the day Judy died. The gays were hiding in the back of the bar or running away. Terrified of breaking the law. Terrified. They are still hiding in the back of the bar whilst others do their fighting for them.

One day, there will be men owning up to not wanting to be gay, staying in the closet because… they will say… ‘I’m not like that… look at what the gays have become…’

This week I purged myself of white, elite gay ‘friends’ on Facebook and I wished I knew… what I could do next.

Roger Ebert died. He wrote to me recently urging me to write more. I have no idea why.

The house in Malibu is filled with my things again and the garden, this beautiful spring, overwhelms me.

Moving back in gave me the opportunity to start editing once again. I threw out three huge boxes of old clothes. Cashmere, labels, everything loved for a moment back then. Helmut, Yves, Issy, Comme des Garcons… boxy shirts from another era, trousers that I can (after my op) still get into but have lost interest in.

The road trip across the USA was spectacular. Chicago, Denver, The Rockies, Utah and Vegas. Just me and the dogs and a car full of art and luggage. I met lovely people and saw cities I had only ever heard of.

I never went over the speed limit.

The operation to have my gall bladder removed was painful but since having the surgery I feel wonderful.

I didn’t realize how much pain I was living with. How the pain made me grumpy, listless and intolerant.

Now, without that girdle of pain, without the imminent GB attacks… I feel perfectly happy. Peaceful.

I can concentrate. perhaps that’s why I need to write?

During the past few months so much has happened. Things I can tell you and things I can’t.

Yet, after the moment passes, I can’t be bothered to write it down.

Editing the huge amount of stuff I own to a few essential pieces. Taking my old stuff to vintage stores, consignment stores and auction houses has been cathartic and profitable. Who knew things were so valuable?

But more than that. It feels like I am winding down. Not is a morbid way.

With less stuff and less girth (since the op I lost a great deal of weight) I feel not only lighter but more agile, more energy to do important things (for me) more time to devote to others, causes, delights.

As you know, those who know me, I like my decisions to be made for me. I LIKED my decisions to be made for me.

Recently I have taken control of the reigns. Less at the mercy of Duncan Roy. Do you know what I’m talking about?

I am going to therapy… daily. I am finally addressing the issues I have been ignoring this past year. You know, those pesky medical issues.

Strangely, without warning… even though we share the same streets. I never see him. Nor do I wish to conjure him, manifest him, make him appear… I had lunch with one of his co-workers the other day, a youngster (we met at an AA meeting) who wanted his job.

It was funny being at the same table as someone who works in close proximity to him. Their opinion.

They knew the story. An urban myth that they delighted in fact checking.

Oh well.

Of course there’s loads going on (Film/House/Social) but somehow I don’t have the energy to write it.

I take pictures and let that suffice.

2.

I found a picture of Joe. He’s obsessively going to the gym. A man mountain. In his late 60’s now.

I scarcely ever think about him. Isn’t that odd? To have no thoughts about someone who was once the center of your world.

Are you kidding? I still like sex with men… but I’m not interested in being gay. Do you understand what I’m saying… gays? Yes you. I’m talking to you. I’M TALKING TO YOU! Yes you, the gay in the bar, on the street, editing his Grindr profile.

Let’s face it. This separation will work out just fine for both of us.

I loathe you and you hate me.

I know, amongst other things, what galls you… you (particularly) don’t like when men in their fifties own up to having a rich and varied sexuality: I’ve been called a ‘dirty old man’ by more gays than I ever have by straights for wanting or having beautiful younger men in my bed. The gays write it anonymously. They post it all over the place, whenever they can. As If I should be ashamed?

You, you who have cornered the market in nihilism, immorality, homogeneousness, bitchery, selfishness, self-aggrandizement, self-obsession… in fact anything with the self prefix… apart from self-awareness.

I am peeling off the parade. I am letting the party wend its way elsewhere.

2. (a)

They told me at Triangle House in LA when we were making our documentary about older gay people: they say that old gay people end up going back into the closet because… it can get ugly… it can get dangerous. They say that gay men are more likely to end up homeless than in any other demographic… because they have no community.

You gays are the very worst at hating yourselves. But you reserve more venom for the elderly homosexual than any other group. It is a sickening idea to many young gays, that we (the elderly) exist. Some young gay people believe that past 50 our penises shrink appropriately into our bodies. Retract. In old age we become like wrinkly Ken dolls with smooth, pink groins.

No longer a threat to anyone.

I thought that when I became old… I would start wearing women’s clothes.

Where do young gay men learn how to be dignified old gay men? I learned from older men in AA how to be an older man. The respect that AA old timers get, applauded for their contribution to the community of AA stands in stark contract to the respect that older gay people don’t get from younger gay people. Unless, of course, they are famous… or comical freaks… or rich enough to buy the boys they used to get for free.

Young gay people don’t want to be reminded that the party comes to an end.

You can keep it all. The gay plays I made, the gay films I directed, the gay art I painted/etched/sculpted.

Take everything I ever made in your honor.

If you don’t want it? Burn it.

2 (c)

When I offered our award-winning film catalogue of gay films to The Legacy Project (the gay and lesbian film preservation project) based out of UCLA… the gays turned it down. Even though AKA had won the LA Outfest audience award and opened (and closed) many gay film festivals all over the world with all of my films.

The Legacy Project said no to the free gift. They wanted me to disappear. They don’t want any evidence that I existed. As a man or an artist.

I don’t drink or take drugs. Tom blew weed into my face. He put vodka into my virgin mary. That’s how the gays bully one another. Try wearing something unusual when your companions just want to be invisible.

“Who does he think he is?”

Their artificially deepened voices. The plaid shirt, the super hero tee. The cloak of invisibility.

Tom has an ‘opinion’ about individuality: He doesn’t believe in it. These gays are terrified of being seen. Gripped by the politics of invisibility. At least that grotesque, lying freak I used to date… he and his boy friend have some sartorial audacity.

Even if it is TOTALLY misguided.

Who are these gays? These invisigays?

Like Tom, they may appear normal.

4.

How can a gay man expect to age with dignity when nobody gay wants to age at all?

I saw it in LA… my destiny. If I chose to take it. At first, Adam looked just like any other confident gay man claiming to be 48. His gay parties are the talk of the town. Richer than most of his friends, though not very well connected … not to the real gay power in LA.

Adam invented the heart valve. At one of his parties (to his chagrin) I photographed every single one of his guests. A snap shot of LA gay life.

He has never been elegant, he has never been a great beauty. He will never be tall. He is, however, manicured, botoxed, his teeth reinvented, his flawless skin, his demeanor… (that only great wealth lends you).

It was at that last raucous party I attended (as a plus one) I saw him upset (rattled)… why?

He looked like an old, vulnerable man.

“What happened?” I asked the gays.

They told me imperiously (as if it were obvious) that the young, chiseled boy he imported from NYC just wanted him for his money. Adam looked… beaten. Crest fallen. His frail hands shook, the delicate skin around his eyes failing.

The gays stood around helplessly as their host fell apart. They stared into the plastic cups of vodka. They played with their nipples. The pimps and the whores waited silently by the sodden beer pong. He turned the music off. Finally, he threw everyone out.

They lined up on the steep drive. A hideous parade of grotesquely young boys, graded online or in public bars for their sexual prowess, their social fallibility, their youth.

The man who invented the heart valve, it seems, suffered from a broken heart.

5.

Take the gay man who gave up his 160k surrogate child for adoption because she had a small birth defect on one of her legs.

Yes, you heard me.

When we interviewed the doctor who makes hundreds and thousands of gay dollars from the gayby industry… he told us that the gays want perfection. Nothing less will do.

Take it all… this gay culture. This gay community. Take it.

Take the video of Bryan with 25 Bel Ami boys jacking off over him. Moisturized with Czech sperm.

Or the man/boy with the huge cock who they pay to sleep with a hooker and unbeknownst to him… tape him.

This tribe of entitled, elitist gays clinging to gay marriage and their smart phones.

6.

I had lunch today with a 30-year-old man/boy who just came out. “Why did it take you so long, ” I ask, “To tell the truth?” He said, “I didn’t… (he paused dramatically) …I mean I still don’t… I don’t want to be gay.”

When, as frightened teens, blooming… prepubescent boys… infants… when we understand that we want to fall in love and fuck and suck and slide into another man… what choices do we have? To describe ourselves?

Gay is the only way. And if you don’t know what you are. The gays will tell you exactly what you are.

The gays are so prescriptive.

He’s gay, they claim conspiratorially. They claim anyone ‘hot’ is gay. They all know someone who had sex with Tom Cruise or Hugh Jackman. “He’s fucking his ‘assistant’.” Oh Yes! He’s had sex with a man… he’s gay. He’s experimented… he’s gay.

Prescriptive.

6 (a)

Hollywood does not lend itself to morals.

CAA agent Kevin Huvane. When you first meet him, he shakes your hand and pulls you toward him. Trying to pull you off-balance. The first time he met me… it worked (I was rocked) the second and third times I was prepared and we set to a gay tug of war, an argy bargy, him attempting to pull me and me attempting to pull him.

The fourth time I let him pull me onto him. I crashed into him. His tiny frame overwhelmed by 6′ 2″ me. He landed in a heap beneath me. “Oh sorry,” I said. “You pulled me toward you. I lost my balance. Sorry… Kevin.”

He’ll put you on a ‘list’ they told me. “I’m on so many lists.” I murmured. “More lists than Cathy Griffin.”

7.

After claiming on the Dr. Drew show that I wanted to make healthy decisions about sex. Somebody wrote to me or about me: If Duncan Roy doesn’t like gay sex… he isn’t gay. He wasn’t far from the truth. At first, I was outraged by their attempts to isolate, malign and lambaste me. They had tried for years. Without success. Every time they try… they fail. This last time… the jail. What the hell did they expect? That I would buckle?

Those who throw rocks at me are seldom innocent of that which they accuse.

8.

The Gays, have become so… bourgeois. Do you understand what that means? Let me refresh your memory:

Marked by a concern for material interests and respectability and a tendency toward mediocrity.

When I was young… gays like you knew their place. They stayed in the closet. I mean. Coming out of the closet was brave! Now anyone can do it and become a fucking hero.

9.

Gays… why are you killing yourselves? You kill yourself because you can’t take a joke, because you can’t hold your liquor, because you can’t say no to crystal… because you don’t want to be gay. I don’t remember young gay people killing themselves in the UK.

It gets better?

What gets better?

Better than death?

10.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m thrilled when any oppressed group gets a bit of equality… but what will the USA gays do with their equality?

I’ll tell you. They will make it even harder for the rest of us to be different. There is a hideous conformity to which these young gays feel they must adhere. Gay life in the USA. A blushing desire for ‘straight acting’ has become a tsunami of heternoramativity. The foundation on which this miserable gay monolith now stands.

Who are you?

A greek god, perfectly muscled, forever young… dressed to be ignored, as bland a personality as he can effect. He is Peter Pan, he is Hercules, his personality as glittering as the Pillsbury Dough Boy.

Do you care about anything other than marriage equality? No. He eats what his parents eat. He would vote republican if they could only find it in their neo con hearts to see that the gays are perfect conservatives.

So. We are divorced. I am no longer gay. I’m OUT. I’m out of here. I’m out but I’m not gay.

New Harris tweed trousers. They are so thick and keep the cold wind from whipping around my legs.

I had two very different experiences on Friday.

1.

The first, an unfortunate spat on Facebook with a Canadian writer called Michael Rowe.

I think you know, those of you who read this regularly, that I struggle with marriage as the means by which gay and straight people find parity.

That marriage in of itself doesn’t seem to work for many of the people who sign up for it… so why do so many men and women in the LGBQ community want it so badly?

Is it just because they want the ‘benefits’?

I thought about it a great deal this week.

For those of us gay men and women who are now in our early fifties marriage was never an option. I never hankered after it, nor cared to think about it.

I read this in a British newspaper.

British MPs are planning to create an “exception” in marriage law for same-sex couples and will not alter the definition of adultery.

Either they don’t take us seriously or we don’t take us seriously?

Perhaps gay marriage is indeed separate from straight marriage because we can’t be trusted with monogamy?

Those I respect seem to value marriage equality… so I have been posting thoughts and feelings on my Facebook page.

I am perturbed by how many angry responses I get whenever I write about my marriage equality concerns.

If marriage equality was all we needed or wanted are we selling ourself short? Are we like any cultural minority that lives side by side the majority needing to be tolerated rather than nurtured? Do we need to be understood? Do they need to learn our language? Or, like Hasidic Jews do we evolve separately once we are ‘equal’. Somehow this is not attractive to me.

This question incensed Michael Rowe.

Where are you getting “all we needed or wanted” from? It’s a basic right. That’s not “tolerance,” that’s equality and strength.

The conversation continued privately.

Talking to Michael was like talking to a Zionist. Realizing that his problem with what I was saying was more about me than the conversation I decided to tread carefully. He is the sort of man who believes that any gay who comes out of the closet is an unqualified hero.

I’m not an intellectual, nor am I particularly bright… but I am willing to listen… and I am desperate to understand why I am so conflicted about marriage equality.

It feels like another way to join another elite gang. A gang that will, if given half the chance, bully you mercilessly.

I’ve seen straight women do this. Brag about their married status to their unmarried friends. Causing those unmarried women to burst into tears when they are far enough away from their persecutor.

I asked Michael what he thought marriage would do to our gay culture. I said, I really want to understand your position.

Not sure what there is to “understand.” Until there is no foundation of complete legal equality for LGBT people, the rest of it, worrying about “our culture,” is frosting with no cake. That’s my position.

Our gay culture is very important to me. Even if it is on a separate page, in it’s own section at the book shop or the video store or on Netflix. I enjoy the separation. You see, I’m not very interested in what straight people make of me or the culture that has sprung up around me.

What will marriage equality do to the gay community?

How will these huge changes affect us and our behavior toward other gay man and women.

If a gay man tells his straight friend that he is getting married will his straight friend feel a flush of envy?

I asked if Michael felt ‘more equal’ than his American friends? He said:

Of course I do. I have approximately 300 more rights than American gay couples whose relationships are not legally recognized, rights that have financial and legal implications.

And no, I don’t feel sorry for gay couples who aren’t married by their choice, but I do feel sorry for those who don’t have that choice.

I don’t think that screaming about how proud you are not to be married carries a lot of weight when that right isn’t even on the table.

Like employment protection. Or do you also feel that a law that protects LGBT Americans from being fired also hurts “our culture?”

Oh dear, Michael was watching the NRA press conference at the time so his irritation may be excused.

He is, as you know, a very important Huffington Post blogger.

A ‘gay voice’. In the separate but equal ‘gay voice’ section of the Huff Post.

There is a great deal in this last quote that may make you wince… as I winced.

I come from England where Tony Blair gave Waheed Ali carte blanche to equalize the lives of hetero and homo sexual people.

I remember eating lunch in Malibu with Waheed who explained to me how the legislation was written.

He explained that the word Marriage may have been attractive to some but perhaps a little too divisive. They chose civil unions as the way forward.

Total equality (excluding the word marriage) was a great incremental step in the right direction and one that the majority of my gay friends in long-term relationships were happy to embrace.

Michael is not so sure.

“Civil unions” aren’t marriage, and they’re not equality.

He continued inaccurately:

They weren’t “chosen,” they were all they could get because no one would allow them to be married, with full marriage equality, including the rights of citizenship for spouses.

Just to be perfectly clear: the British do have rights for citizenship for spouses and UNMARRIED partners.

Now, that’s what I’m talking about.

After many years of legal parity, the British gays… from a position of strength are asking for the word marriage and asking a very conservative government to boot. They are certain to succeed.

Civil Union may be the best incremental baby step on offer?

What are the incremental baby steps that seem to get American gays no closer to federal recognition of same-sex marriage?

Married Michael Rowe is very proud of his life.

He has achieved what his parents probably wanted for him all through his childhood. The dream of a heteronormative existence.

The rest of the conversation disintegrated into name calling. He called me tiresome, I ended up calling him a cunt and he blocked me on FB and that was that.

If I were in my early thirties I might think that this is a golden age for gay men and lesbians. That I could enjoy a fully ‘out’ existence, meet the man of my dreams, marry him, buy some surrogate children and live happily ever after.

That is a perfectly lovely dream to have.

But I am still in two minds. Shouldn’t we all be fighting for something more than marriage, that marriage should not allow those who are to have so much more than those who are not?

This is not equality.

Some married gay men (like Michael) are already behaving like my mother and grandmother behaved toward their spinster/old maid/barren friends. Looking down their married noses.

Do I feel cheated out of different sort of gay life? If I had grown up around gay men getting married would I have thought differently about the men I dated and the future we could have had?

I have, undoubtedly, missed the man/man marriage boat. Joe and I talked about it briefly.

When I was growing up the thought of marriage (one man to another) was simply not a consideration. Like an orthodox jew would never think about eating bacon. I didn’t really think anything of not being married.

Being brought up in a small town where the majority of my straight peers had children but no marriage… marriage seemed Victorian and absurd. The people who were getting married were not… cool. They were… boring.

My straight friends who remained unmarried with many children did very well for themselves. They ran successful businesses. Their children went to great universities. They struggled and excelled equally along side those children who came from married families and broken homes.

There really was no difference between them and any other child.

The emphasis on family values seems to have gripped the gays as firmly as the straights.

What ever family means we don’t want to be left out of the explanation.

We all have a family of sorts. Some have blood relatives, others have an extended family of strangers.

Obviously, I have invested in the latter and have never been let down.

Which brings me to the final part of my blog today.

2.

Sitting with the dogs on Franklin outside my coffee shop of choice I met a young Rabbi.

Charming, Cambridge educated and very enthusiastic.

He invited me to Shabbat the following Friday night.

I had, of course, enjoyed many a Friday night with the Cohen’s in LA. David, his wife and their 6 children. 40 people for pot luck dinner around a huge table on the lawn then talking about world events with a talking stick. It was perfect.

This Shabbat was very different.

There were several rabbinical students. I arrived mid prayer. For an hour we prayed.

The most exquisite boy with the most beautiful voice (and a baby) sang something on his own before the others joined in. When he started singing I began to cry.

They prayed and sang (they sang in Hebrew) and faced East, my rabbi friend was particularly enthusiastic. I sat beside him and he kept apologizing for everything, as if it were a trial for me to be there… when in fact it was beautiful.

I sat there thinking about the gays. After my run in with Michael.

I wondered if they would have confused my thoughts about how beautiful the singer was with wanting to fuck him. That most of my gay friends wouldn’t have just enjoyed him, they would have wanted to fuck him. “He’s hot…”

We ate a huge dinner. We washed our hands ritually. After the dinner and conversations with truly wonderful people (I avoided talking Palestine) we sat together for more prayers and a fascinating chat about the Torah.

The young rabbinical students and scholars discussed in a really modern and interesting way what I had been taught was the Old Testament.

Jacob, Joseph and the blessing of the Pharaoh:

My years have been few and difficult.

They talked about other things.

A young man with thick, raven black hair told us he had just visited Sandy Hook. To offer ‘solace’.

At first I was irritated by the apparent intrusion, it seemed so arrogant.

I was wrong.

He explained that the town was packed with people from all over the world. That he had witnessed a funeral of one of the murdered children and the parents of the dead child were holding up signs in the car that said, very simply: “THANK YOU.”

I found him after dinner and thanked him for reminding me that it’s easy to let other people do the difficult tasks.

If Sandy Hook had been an isolated incident then I might have felt differently but Sandy Hook is part of a macabre American theme and we must all, collectively… own it.

It is our responsibility.

That young Jewish man and his five friends had taken responsibility and travelled to Sandy Hook.

By doing so, they had a spiritual awakening. They were thanked by the parents of dead infants.

They understood (unlike those of us who did not go) something more about America, about bravery, about priority, about consequence.

The two parts of my day could not have been more different. The childish spat with an entitled gay man and the spiritual warmth of new family offered me by a group of heterosexual strangers.

Inclusion versus exclusion.

Last night Lady Rizo and I had dinner with Winston Churchill’s granddaughter. I was not the only gay at the dinner for 50. I avoided the other gays.

Then, I meet a woman who KNOWS all about my film. I mean, she knows the story like an urban myth. But it’s not a myth. It’s the sad truth.

“Oh, I know this story,” she said. Her eyes sparkling with anticipation. “I think he’s my friend on Facebook. Yes, look…” she pulls out her smart phone and there he is. I push the phone away. I shouldn’t be looking at that.

“What was he thinking?” she roars with laughter.

Women love my film. It confirms everything they think they know about men. The injustice of men.

Dead five-year olds. 20 of them.

The children are shot dead by a crazed, entitled white boy. The little bodies buried this week. Lined up against the wall and executed. You know they didn’t have a clue. You know they did as they were told.

I thought about the little dog facing the lethal injection.

A horrific pendant: ten Afghan children are splattered into the mud by a drone.

Somehow their little brown faces are missing from the media. Somehow the little white children in Connecticut are worth more.

This week has been all about mental illness and guns. The mild wet weather. The poem. The fiscal cliff. Obama. That’s PRESIDENT Obama to you.

We asked you to vote for him, now he’s letting us down all over again. Surprise, fucking surprise.

I saw a man being mugged on the 5 train. Into Manhattan, a stealthy, tall, nimble black man rips an iPhone 4s out of an asian man’s hands leaving him with his ear phones on his head. The rest of us sat amazed.

The white people urged him to call the police but he said, “I’m already late for work.”

I’m buying a parker. It’s lined with blood-red shearling. Like the monkey they found in Ikea.

Dinner in the neighborhood, dinner at the Mercer Kitchen with Courtney, dinner at the Standard Grill with Brock.

Dinner with Cristina who I have not seen for 30 years on the floor of her palatial Upper East Side home. It was as if all those 30 years just melted away. That we were friends again from last week. Funny, compelling, brilliant, beautiful Cristina.

Dinner with new gay AA friends in cheap diners.

Dinner at Mary’s Fish Camp with Benoit. We stop at Boxers (gay bar) on the way home. There’s nothing for us. Benoit peels off leaving me on the street and as I wait for the green light a handsome green eyed man says hello.

At first I wonder why. Why is this stunningly handsome 27-year-old man saying hello to me.

Then we’re in Barracuda kissing each other.

I’m wearing that huge fur hat.

I can’t kiss him any more. I can’t suck any more spit out of his mouth. I can’t look into his green eyes.

I am so overwhelmed by him I walk through the rain until I am soaked to the skin. Wondering how it happens? Wondering how it ends up like this?

I felt like I was on the winning side. Their Schadenfreude didn’t feel dangerous… it felt old-fashioned.

On the way home I listened to something on NPR about a group called LA Jews for Peace.

A group of Jewish Americans committed to peace in the Middle East through a negotiated settlement to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, an end of the Israeli occupation of Palestinian lands, and opposition to American militarism, imperialism, and exceptionalism.

Their spokesman bemoaned America’s UN vote against Palestine.

America, like the old white men at the coffee shop, seems unable to comprehend or adapt to the changing world.

What the white men at the coffee shop don’t seem to acknowledge: they have more in common with their President than they seem to realize. I mean… Obama is only half black, raised by white folks… cup half full lads? Surely?

Obama owns his whiteness in the Whitehouse and flays his blackness on the stump.

Barry Goodman (old white jew), unfriended me on FB the day the UN recognized the Palestinians right to statehood.

Just nine nations voted against the Palestinian Authority’s upgrade to nonvoting observer state status, which passed the General Assembly 138-9, with 41 abstentions.

Voting “No” on Thursday were Israel, the United States and Canada, joined by the Czech Republic, Panama and several Pacific island nations: Marshall Islands, Micronesia, Nauru and Palau. The Pacific nations typically support the U.S. and Israel at the U.N. on key General Assembly resolutions.

In the face of this terrific news self hating jews like Barry Goodman reacted like spoiled, entitled children.

In a unanimous resolution passed Sunday, Israel’s Cabinet said it would not negotiate on the basis of the General Assembly’s recognition of a state of Palestine in the occupied West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza Strip.

“The unilateral step taken by the Palestinians at the United Nations violates peace agreements,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu complained, justifying Israel’s rejection of the U.N. vote.

Astoundingly, he bleated:

“The only way to Palestinian statehood and peace is through direct negotiations with Israel.”

Then he told the rest of the non compliant world he was going to hold onto money that was owed to the Palestinians and build all over their shit.

2.

I don’t trust any of the gay men I meet in LA. Industry men.

Bryan. WTF?

I had lunch with one of Bryan’s boy toys yesterday, the second in one week. I met a technician Bryan works with, Bryan says, “I don’t want to direct movies, I want someone else to direct them and I critique their results.”

After I started defending the Palestinians during the Israeli bombardment Guy S (second rate Bryan sycophant) tells me that they all hate me. That’s like music to my ears.

I call Tom. Tom denies what I already know to be the truth.

They know, they all know that sooner or later I’m going to write everything down.

As my gay friends, blindly devoted to President Obama, danced with joy at the news that gay marriage was being approved by popular vote in three states… the first of its kind, that an ‘out’ lesbian had been elected to the US senate and that ‘their guy’ was going back to the White House… I shifted uncomfortably in my bed.

In May, after years of unconvincingly claiming that his (Obama’s) view on gay marriage was “evolving”, it miraculously matured five months before an election as support from gay and lesbian voters and young people – who are far more likely to support marriage equality – appeared to be softening. A month later he halted the deportation of thousands of young undocumented immigrants with an executive order.

He could have done either one at any time.

The Guardian

As the results came in I watched my Twitter/Facebook/Tumblr feeds explode.

Lance Black told us that he was crying so hard with gratitude for the people of Maine, so blinded by tears he could scarcely post his thanks on Facebook.

All night I knew that I was witnessing something sickeningly dishonest, as ersatz as the twin towers crumbling seem to conspiracy theorists.

I wondered again and again about the relative values of my gay brethren.

You see, I couldn’t stop thinking about just one gay man.

I was plagued with the young face of Bradley Manning who presently sits in jail, a victim of Obama’s rarely mentioned dark side.

Since July 2010 he has been kept naked and in solitary confinement. According to his family he is going slowly insane.

Manning, you may remember, had blown the whistle on American war crimes in Iraq. He posted videos, unleashed a torrent of classified information to Wikileaks… his fury knew no bounds.

He had every reason to be angry. He related to the wholesale cruelty and injustice being perpetrated on the Iraqi people.

Manning’s had a crippling history of emotional abuse, neglect, bullying and abandonment .

As a teenager he was taken to the UK by his British mother. At school in Wales he became the target of bullying because he was the only American. The students would imitate his accent, and they apparently abandoned him once during a camping trip. His aunt told The Washington Post: “He woke up, and all the tents around him were gone. They left while he was sleeping.” He was also targeted for being effeminate.

As an adult he had one of two choices, he could take it out on himself like so many gay men and kill himself… or he could take it out on those who gave him the most pain.

He was rightly furious at how he was being personally treated by the military… facing his own demons as well as the worlds.

Every day he bore witness to atrocities against the Iraqi people, (the very people he was apparently trying to protect) and the atrocity of institutionalized homophobia.

Some soldiers, driven mad by war, punish Iraqis. A soldier walks into a village on his own and kills innocent men, women and children. Some take it out on each other, a soldier rapes or damages or kills a colleague. We know these stories. They are legion.

It was the largest set of restricted documents ever leaked to the public.

The Wikipedia page for Manning has a great deal of unsubstantiated detail describing his ‘true nature’, over turning tables, punching women in the face, carving words into a chair.

Meanwhile, the heteronormative lesbian (Tammy Baldwin), looking like Laura Bush in her puce, slubbed silk jacket was on her way to the Senate. Hailed by the gays (even the ones who have no lesbian or even women friends) as the great Sappho answer to the LGBT political conundrum, applauding as she goes down on the neo-liberal pussy… rainbow bunting festoons her office.

Is Tammy Baldwin our LGBT hero? Will the people of Maine win a GLAAD award like the people of Europe won the Nobel Peace Prize?

Bradley Manning is a true hero, a gay hero, a young man of conscience… yet he has been all but abandoned by the gay community.

Don’t weep for the people of Maine for voting on something that shouldn’t even have been on the ballot. Weep for Bradley Manning who sits in a cell today for showing all of you the crimes being committed in your name.

2.

According to the New York Times, preparing President Obama for his first Presidential debate against Mitt Romney proved an impossible task for even his most trusted advisors.

David Axelrod, a senior strategist, told a surly Mr. Obama that he seemed distracted, but the President shrugged him off. “I’ll be there on game day,” he said. “I’m a game day player.”

As it turned out the President was not a ‘game day player’, famously caught off guard by Romney’s meticulous debate preparation he crashed and burned leaving many of his most ardent supporters wondering why they were supporting him at all.

Aloof, dismissive and far more confident in his own ability than he should be.

For those who have performed on stage can confirm, no amount of rehearsal is long enough for any performance. The dress rehearsal is imperative, it is at the dress rehearsal where all catastrophic mistakes will be made, never to be made again.

To have no rehearsal, no dress rehearsal, to stand on stage without any rehearsal whatsoever is arrogant at best, monumentally dumb at worst.

Arrogance may be Obama’s defining character defect. More details reveal the President to be an even less sympathetic character.

Two startling facts:

He has never entertained either President Carter nor Clinton at the White House and complains frequently about being under valued.

“Stories abound of big donors who stopped giving as much or working as hard because Obama never reached out, either with a Clinton-esque warm bath of attention or Romney-esque weekend love fests and Israeli-style jaunts; of celebrities who gave concerts for his campaigns and never received thank-you notes or even his full attention during the performance; of public servants upset because they knocked themselves out at the president’s request and never got a pat on the back.”

There is an obvious lack of sophistication about the first couple that no amount of Jason Woo, Simon Doonan table settings or fancy interior decoration will ever mask.

Obama’s arrogance, his ego maniacal obsession with his own success would be worth something if he had some huge scheme, some Housman type plan, some Churchillian grandiosity, some Napoleonic zeal but all his arrogance boils down to… well, a miserable compromise.

Many liberals were annoyed during the first Obama term that Bush-era strong-arm tactics (including the ubiquitous executive order) were not used… even as the President was bullied relentlessly by house Republicans after he lost control of Congress.

After the ‘shellacking’ he continue his obsequious placating of the far right of the Republican party. Rather than insist on defending his oft lauded centrist position he crawled ignominiously further right to placate his foes.

The most annoying leitmotif of President Obama’s last four years, a recurring theme… must be his constant reference to himself as The President because if he didn’t remind you who he was… you might forget.

“I’m the president.” he tells anyone who will listen. “I’m the President!” he smiles, like JayZ might tell you he had sold more tracks on iTunes than any other artist since the Beatles.

And if that sounds vaguely racist, I remind you again what Don Lemons told me about The President, “Obama is the kind of black man who looks scared of white people.”

There’s something to be said for this analysis.

Not wanting to prepare for the Presidential debate reveals Obama’s fear of the very men the rest of us want to see him stand up against: The Good ol’ Boys.

The very same men who are at this moment witnessing the end of their white America, the very same white men who could not believe America would elect a black President twice.

The man they had humiliated with obstructionist politics, like tripping the nigger on the side-walk… just because they could.

His fear of white people coupled with the pitiful jokes, the self-deprecating bon mot.

“I was too polite.” he offered up after the first debate.

It caused radical friends to throw up their hands in fury.

Barry Obama, against all the Republican odds, is President re-elect. It is up to him to start taking those who elected him seriously and not for granted. It is up to us to drag this weedy President firmly into the 21st Century.

Americans, it seems, are baying for a modern America.

The cabal of white (Republican looking) social engineers who stand behind Obama (Tim Geithner et al) , using their half-black, amiable front man as a shield behind which they steal the money…. well, they need to wake up.

There are too many vocal opponents to the wholesale compromise that defined Obama’s first term.

Those who supported Obama the second time around are delivering a firm rebuke. They want stuff.

The white men who have been controlling Obama, offering false hope to the Latinos and the gays to motivate their base… have opened Pandora’s box… yet the evil in the box seems poisonous only to the Republicans… for the rest of us it is the liberal air we breath.

“You mean, do I think Lee Baca is a racist?” I replied. “Well, he is just part of the racist problem in the USA but he gets to be the executioner.”

In a country where most people are enslaved by debt, lack of education, obesity, religious/corporate ideology and hubris it is very easy to forget about ones own enslavement and think nothing of enslaving and demonizing others.

The primary reason I would never vote (if I could) for a second Obama term, regardless of his so-called pro gay marriage smokescreen (designed largely to melt liberal hearts) is his appalling deportation record.

The Obama administration’s deportation policies, which rely on cooperation between local law enforcement and federal immigration authorities, have already been challenged in California.

Legislation that would have prohibited sheriffs and police departments from enforcing ICE holds in most cases was, as I have already written, vetoed by Gov. Jerry Brown last month.

Barrack Obama has deported more people from the USA than any other President in this country’s history.

It goes without saying that the Gay media and my local Malibu newspaper will totally ignore this story. I am neither pretty enough nor non-controversial for either to cover the story.

Even though it may be of interest to both communities.

Most gay men are unaware that if they fell in love with a non-American their state marriage certificate or their Foreign marriage certificate would mean absolutely nothing to the Federal Immigration Department.

Their husband/wife would risk deportation.

The gay men I know think that deportation happens to other people… you know… brown people. Not people like us.

Those same gay men run the gay media.

Scott McPherson from The Advocate told me recently that he totally supported The President’s immigration policy and (after I explained to him what a drone was and who was being killed by them) he told me he had no interest in who drones were killing.

All Scott wants is marriage equality. Apparently, only for Americans to marry other Americans.

You might think that Malibu is a liberal, open-minded place…. with all those rich über gays living down there on the beach… but I have endured more homophobia in Malibu than even my small home town village of Whitstable in Kent where one might expect the crushingly narrow-minded.

My Armenian neighbor was so vile about me and my young gay renter, her invective so shocking… it almost took my breath away.

So. It has begun.

Where the runes fall… is none of my business.

Somehow the very act of laying ones self bare, open to all sorts of scrutiny, is a relief.

Regardless of the outcome, I am very happy to be of service to those who can least help themselves.

The bill, which was the antithesis of Arizona’sSB 1070, would have helped stop racial profiling and restore trust and transparency between California’s communities and law enforcement officials.

While the outcome of the fight is disappointing, I am thankful for activists who appealed to Governor Brown by signing thousands of petitions then making hundreds of calls to his office urging him to sign the bill.

Adam Luna, is the Political Director of America’s Voice, a leading immigrants rights organization wanted to share this message:

“While it was a bitter disappointment to see the governor veto the TRUST Act, I wanted to let you know how much your activism and solidarity made a real difference.

11,300 petition signatures (more than any other organization!), which were hand-delivered in Sacramento, hundreds of phone calls — it was amazing.”

Those of us in the immigration reform movement know that this is not a fight which is going to be won overnight and the governor said that he’s open to making a deal next year because he knows that you, and we, won’t rest until the fight is won.

While Governor Brown’s failure of leadership on this issue is disheartening, the campaign for fair and sensible immigration policies will go on.

Next week I will be announcing my very own action against the secure communities protocol that incarnated me and thousands of people like me.

A few months ago a young, gay Australian man here legally in the USA on a tourist visa was arrested for peeing in public (a sex crime felony in the state of California) and held in the Men’s Country Jail until he agreed to be deported.

The more the right talk about, manifest socialism… the more the people will investigate. A self-fulfilling prophesy. The ill-judged Romney 47% remark seems to have hit a chord.

What sort of chord?

What does this random remark mean to those currently unemployed, underwater, disenfranchised?

In Europe the people are storming the palace. Austerity for what? Debt, deficit, bankers… as explosive as any Molotov cocktail to a modern European .

What is this debt? To whom do we owe the money? How did we get there in the first place? And why should we pay it back?

Unfortunately, if you rely on network nightly news programs for your information about the economy, you are likely to be misinformed about the main causes of the current deficit: in order of importance, the economic downturn, the Bush tax cuts and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The Bush tax cuts dwarf all other policy changes, costing the country an estimated $375 billion this year, or 24 percent of the deficit.

Newsweek: “the tax cuts were by far the largest, adding up to $2.3 trillion over 10 years.” Forty percent of the tax cuts’ benefits went to people earning over $500,000.

With cumulative spending of over $1.2 trillion for the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, the post-9/11 military escalation rounds out the list of top deficit culprits at 14 percent. (The cost could reach up to $4 trillion, including future veterans’ expenses.)

The news media under report or simply ignore the truth about the deficit instead concentrating on entitlements as the main culprit for the obscene debt.

The myth of the deficit is perpetuated by both parties, Republican and Democrat. It is very unlikely that the truth will ever be revealed by either Democratic incumbent or Republican Nominee.

If Obama wins in November he will have to re-calibrate his Presidency. He’ll have nothing to lose.

He may do what the loyal people of the USA have held onto both good and bad about their friendly President… that he is in fact the ultimate dog in the manger… an unchecked liberal, a gay loving entitlement loving…. muslim socialist… ready to launch the USA into the groovy 21st Century?

“Whenever people agree with me I always feel I must be wrong.”

They have no interest in the beautiful world around you unless it can be used to make more money.

They think conservation is for losers.

They will mine every last piece of coal, sell every last drop of oil, catch every fish, chop every tree without consideration for you or your children.

They have scant regard for other humans unless they have achieved what they define as success: huge amounts of money and power.

They believe in slavery.

In their dark world you will be enslaved with huge personal debt as soon as it is reasonable to impose it upon you.

So obese you’ll be unable to defend yourself, or run fast enough from crazed, gun-toting children high on prescription meds.

You will have no option but to eat cheap gmo food that causes rampant obesity in you and your family.

Your local school will be stripped of funds so your children remain uneducated and unable to intelligently question their plan.

They will teach your kids, when they can get away with it, the debunking of a thousand years of empirical scientific evidence in favor of ridged adherence to the bible.

You will fear being sick and die long before you are expected because of the appalling health care system that they proudly tell the world is the very best.

Finally, you will live in toxic shame inspired by Christian‘morality’.

If you ‘fail’ the system by becoming unemployed they will demonize you, your peers will accuse you of laziness. You will be encouraged to blame brown people for your misfortune.

Ryan and Romney will achieve their aim by frightening the oppressed proletariat with dishonest bogey men: the deficit, the end of the traditional family and foreign terrorism.

They will succeed as other tyrants have before them.

The people are simply too fatigued to fight their lies and mythology.

Complicated and realistic solutions have been long abandoned in favor of easy and inchoate sound bites.

I had a dream last night that I was fucking Paul Ryan. After I ejaculated I pulled my cock out of his ass… but it was no longer a penis…. It was a crucifix… Covered in blood shit and cum.

Finally, I rather like the new, gamine Miley Cyrus. A world apart from the generic valley girl she once was. What the hell is all the fuss? Proof (if you needed it) that people don’t really like celebrating individuality. Preferring the homogenous mass.

Now, the bill will need a concurrent vote from the Assembly (the first version of the bill passed the Assembly last year, so another vote is needed given that the bill was amended this year), and then it will head to the Governor’s desk.

I set out at 6am for the Men’s County Jail to see my friend Jeremy who is presently residing in dorm 5200. Jeremy is a good-looking white man in his mid-thirties. A meth head with a penchant for transsexuals. He has two kids in Utah. He used to manage an ihop. He is the kind of character I couldn’t invent from a movie I couldn’t write. A charming man with anger issues. Like most inmates he is pre-occupied with his own case, another miserable drug dealer hauled off the streets. We spoke for thirty minutes, I left $50 for him to eat well and I drove home.

The deputies who processed us into the jail were very pleasant, polite.

2.

Yesterday we drove to Redondo Beach where we met with Democratic State Senator Lieu. The second State Senator I have met this month. He has a strange constituency, ranging from progressive liberals in the Venice area to hard-core Odinists in Orange County. We sat in the sparse office with his Harvard educated interns. They were polite but they didn’t offer us water or coffee.

Our successful visit last month to Senator Calderon lead to his decision to co-sponsor the Trust Act. The bill then passed the Senate Public Safety Committee and is now headed towards the Senate Floor . The Trust Act will make what happened to me less likely to happen to others. It may liberate the 3000 un-convicted men and women currently held on ICE holds in California. The Trust Act will demand that ICE follows its own guidelines, its own rules.

It is essential that Senator Lieu support this bill.

Lieu is an interesting man. In his Redondo office there is a huge studio photograph of Lieu and his family lounging on a white, fluffy rug. He is wearing a dress shirt but no tie. He has been a vociferous supporter of the LGBT community, especially the transsexual population for whom he reserves special respect.

I sat with Kristine Chong from The Californian Immigrants Policy Center and three other Immigrant rights specialists… including a day labourer from Mexico in the Senator’s dingy ‘conference’ room. Lieu’s people wore badly cut suits. We all began to sweat in the un air-conditioned office.

Antonio, the day laborer, spoke very movingly about the catastrophic effect ICE and the Secure Communities protocol are having on the immigrant population. Families broken apart, 5000 American children made orphans, their mothers and fathers deported. Immigrants are routinely forced to sign deportation papers or threatened with months held in privately owned immigration camps, camps that are currently costing the people of California 6 million dollars a year

The situation is tantamount to ethnic cleansing.

This state has enjoyed, for many years, low-cost manual labour on which their false economy was based. Now, these undocumented migrants are being rounded up like animals. Targeted on the streets, in their cars, in their homes.

ICE have to deport 400, 000 people a year to fulfill a federal government quota. Even President Obama’s announcement last week supporting The Dream Act didn’t stop three ‘Dreamers’ being deported yesterday.

I told my story. I told them what they must have heard many times out of Latino mouths. Spanish speakers, their accents somehow devaluing what they have to say. Listen to me. Listen to my clipped British accent. Listen to me eloquently tell my story. Pay attention to the dramatic pauses.

It is always very shocking for them (especially the starched, ivy league interns) that an affluent white person could have got caught up in the immigration net. They bowed their heads in shame. After 45 minutes our meeting is over.

They tell us that Lieu’s support on the Senate floor cannot be assured, he has to pamper to the right-wing element of his constituency. They say: Lieu, in the past, has been threatened physically for supporting immigrants rights. He received death threats. Pampering to the right? I ask incredulously. Pampering to the right will keep this state poor, our children uneducated, the prisons full and gay men like me… unmarried and childless.

Be brave, I urge him, and do the right thing.

As we are leaving we pass another group of men and women patiently waiting their turn to be heard. They could have been Odinists for all I know, demanding that Lieu hunt down every illegal immigrant in California and throw away the key.

Woke up early. Wanted to get the daub onto the stove. It’d been marinating all night.

Then, something about the process, the action of stirring the pot, as it began to simmer…broke something in me. Like I was having a rare moment of clarity, sanity…and I felt a terrible guilt for the way I had treated…not him…but his parents…drawing them into our drama. Collateral damage.

I wanted to write to them and tell them how sorry I was.

They were innocent.

Then I found that Avadon picture of Ginsberg and his long-term lover Orlovsky. And I thought about them ‘long-term’ and what they were thinking, or not thinking when they kissed for the camera.

I thought about the way they, we…I…describe what we have as long term.

Long term insists that we take what they had seriously. Ginsberg had not just met some man on the street and taken him into the studio. He had made some sort of commitment. Long term.

And I thought that marriage would be just that…long term. That our beards would grow long together. That I would never ever tire of looking at you. Kissing you.

Then I remember that I am here in LA. You send me a picture of Washington Square. It’s all I need right now. A picture.

The whole house smells of beef in red wine, fresh herbs, fresh garlic.

I had lunch with Robby on Monday. We ate a lamb burger at Gjelina. I drank ginger and mint italian soda.

He has been having a wonderful time. Earning masses of cash, loving his man and roaming with his homies. Yes, I wrote that.

On Wednesday I met a friend for lunch, a lunch that didn’t end until 3am. He is 23, he lied about his age. He told me he was older. A masculine dilettante.

Then, after dinner, we lay in the back of his SUV by the beach and kissed each other until my face was raw, my heart was racing, my legs were trembling. I was so completely overwhelmed that I could not drive for ne’er a mile before I had to stop and beg a cigarette from a passer-by.

He is beautiful. He gnawed at my neck until I could not bear it any more.

So, that’s what love looks like in a warm climate. For a moment. Not long-term. Not to be taken seriously. Just a moment. I have trained myself not to yearn for more.

So, the daub will cook for four more hours until it is tender. We will eat it with home-made noodles.

Yasmin Nair: Gay marriage, as framed in the United States, is the ultimate neoliberal fantasy, in that it allows for a politics of the personal to masquerade as a necessity for policy change. In the process, it serves to distract us from the very real issues facing millions of U.S. citizens and residents.

For many gays just listening to the President say gay and lesbian and marriage and agree in the same sentence was enough to have them wildly screaming with joy. Heading to their local bar and ordering martinis and Brazilian wax jobs…

You know, I’m an old fart, I’ve heard many politicians from all manner of countries embrace their gay electorate. The ones I remember best are Paul Keating in Australia who gave an impassioned speech about anti-vilification and inclusivity (made me cry) and of course Tony Blair who charged Waheed (Ali) with his far-reaching UK gay equality bill. (did not make me cry)

It seemed to us, during the grim Thatcher years, that gay rights would never materialize…that we were not welcome in our own country…but I put my faith in activists like Peter Tatchell who steadfastly turned up outside the homes of homophobes, the offices of homophobic organizations, held incendiary Outrage! placards, got arrested and generally caused trouble where ever he could so that our enemy never felt like they could get away with discriminatory behavior.

The gay elite sneered at Peter. They hated him for his trouble making, they called him insane, they denigrated his direct action. Recently, Elton John famously said that he was scared of Peter Tatchell but now (decades later) understands how important people like Peter are.

Peter is a national treasure, brain-damaged from repeated police beatings, poor from dedicating himself to our equality…thankfully he has been embraced by the same elite who once scoffed at his anarchic antics.

He taught me: never accept anything a politician says at face value.

So, when President Obama, flagging in popularity amongst his own, wants a boost? There we are…the convenient truth.

Today, I managed to incite the ire of my friends and foes alike by sneering at President Obama’s ill-judged and badly timed personal opinion about marriage equality.

The day after the 39th state in the union denounced same sex marriage and civil unions…North Carolina…he decides to ‘bravely’ come out for the gays.

Not everyone bought the president’s evolution.

“Waiting until AFTER the vote that divested NC’s gays of their constitutional /civil rights to speak for marriage equality is cowardly NOT heroic.” Roseanne Barr

Either POTUS had been forced into sharing his opinion by VP Joe Biden who declared his support for marriage equality a day or so earlier…or the entire fiasco had been manufactured by David Axelrod so President Obama could finally reclaim and re-energize his base.

“The president sets the policy. I am absolutely comfortable with the fact that men marrying men, women marrying women, and heterosexual men and women marrying another are entitled to the same exact rights, all the civil rights, all the civil liberties. And quite frankly, I don’t see much of a distinction– beyond that.” Joe Biden

Frankly, it wouldn’t surprise me if the scenario had been planned.

The President merely said what any intelligent, liberal, modern man in his position must have thought for some time. I doubt whether his position had ‘evolved’. All that had ‘evolved’ was the moment his pro gay position could be revealed for maximum impact.

He was described as ‘brave’ his decision as ‘risky’ and his few words as ‘historical’. The interview applauded by gay groups and liberal straights alike.

Today, yesterday, I engaged in heated debates on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter, famously pissing off Jesse Tyler Fergusonwho appeared last night on Piers Morgan gushing over the president like a Thai hooker.

Jesse Tyler Ferguson ‏ @jessetyler

@duncaninla change takes time. It’s impossible to please everyone. Especially those who make it impossible to please.

Within minutes of the president’s pronouncement his liberal apotheosis began.

I was bombarded with fund raising requests from organizations like the HRC who shamelessly picked over the bones of the ‘unexpected’ Presidential LGBT patronage. The Obama ‘evolution’ will net millions for his campaign from traditionally very generous LGBT donors.

The gays reacted with unbridled and unquestioning enthusiasm, as a community we seem addicted to good news and paternalistic validation.

Upon hearing the Obamamessiah’s announcement Andrew Sullivan, the gay pundit had ‘tears in his eyes’. President Obama, according to Sullivan, has ‘let go of fear’. In Sullivan’s sentimental one issue world he succumbs, finally to the President’s change he could believe in.

Sullivan guesses that Obama has owned his blackness is the same way we must own our gayness. (I had tears in my eyes when I read that)

Andrew Sullivan gushes along side our friend Jesse Ferguson: The President’s endorsement will make young gays feel better about themselves, gay parents will know their kids have a place in the USA. In Sullivan’s exciting new world of Presidential fearlessness there’s a great deal of…expectation…I hope he isn’t disappointed.

Unless…of course, you’re the parents of children killed in drone attacks in northern Afghanistan…or find yourself out of a home or a job because the President is still fearful of the banks and his own military.

I found myself wondering what young straight people were thinking. Those who have supported the abstract notion of marriage equality but now peer at it cautiously…startled by the Presidential candor…like it’s a real issue and not something they have patiently listened to their gay friends bang on about.

Straight people might agree in principle with marriage equality but when ever we find this issue on the ballot…we lose.

Black voters, led by black churches, have played key roles in blocking same-sex marriage in states like California, where 2008 exit polls indicated about 70 percent black opposition, and Maryland, where black Democrats were part of a statehouse coalition that stalled a gay marriage bill in 2011.

Which brings me to this: The nub, the thorny question of style.

I have never liked the word marriage. It is steeped in heterosexual tradition.

I have never felt like I wanted to own this non secular word. It has nothing to do with me or the language and traditions of the gay life I evolved along side other men and women if the UK.

Yasmin Nair: “The fight for gay marriage, in granting that institution so much importance, is slowly eroding the possibility that the rest of the population might get rights and benefits without marrying each other. The fight over gay marriage has emerged as a progressive cause that all progressive straights should join when, in fact, it’s a deeply conservative movement that strips our movement of any imagination. Instead of asking for one way to grant rights and benefits, we ought to be advocating for a multiplicity of options.”

It is my understanding that when Waheed Ali was given the choice…he chose (after consultation) civil union as the way forward for British Gays and Lesbians. Now, 15 years later, those words are once again being re-evaluated. British gays are demanding the word marriage. Not my choice but, thankfully, they are fighting from a position of power.

Their equal rights already assured the word marriage is merely the icing on the equality cake…nor thankfully are the LGBT community in the UK hankering for the Queen to validate their position.

Once upon a time Civil Unions were mooted then tentatively offered to the LGBT community here in the USA but…they turned them down flat.

Even George W Bush thought Civil Unions a good idea. The LGBT community said they were not prepared to be separate but equal yet in the same breath tried convincing the skeptical that incremental baby steps toward marriage equality was the only way.

Now, even Civil Unions are being outlawed for gay people. Since Bush left office the right wing has become insanely entrenched, enraged, intractable….and unbelievably…more right wing.

Later, in the ‘historic’ interview President Obama made it clear what he considered important elements of a marriage: Commitment and monogamy. I nearly choked. So many of my gay friends do not rate monogamy highly on their list of per-requisites for a good gay marriage.

We are entering uncharted moral territory.

Yesterday, my educated American friends were baffled and confused when I said: Capitalism discovered that the LGBT community was generally well educated and affluent…and could be bought.

It is indeed a very interesting time to be gay in the USA. However, I’d like to see less simpering, fewer baby steps and more activism. Less cowardice and ass bleaching and more brave souls willing to be arrested and stand up for the rights they expect others to win for them.

What we do with this presidential approval is up to us.

The only time I have ever felt proud of American gays in my life time was when prop 8 was ratified. The people took to the streets, they ensnared the traffic of Los Angeles, stormed Mormon churches and caused mayhem in the city.

It was a night to be proud to be gay and I urge you all to remember the anger you felt that night because you must feel that anger every night until you are equal in every way.

Jeanne Cordova: “At the time, selling out our radical underpinnings made me very sad. We egg-throwers had to morph into omelet makers. Unhappily, I was left with the realization that all social movements start with radical ideology, but unless they progress to a blood and guts revolution, like a socialist overthrow, movements must inevitably adopt a civil rights and assimilationist stance or die out.”

It feels like I haven’t written anything for weeks. Living this simple and unexpected life. I’ve no idea what comes next nor do I care. Occasionally I wonder what it would be like to be back at home…Whitstable. It is waiting for me.

Sunday, I drove 100 miles North East to the Inland Empire to meet my lover. We booked into a cheap hotel and spent the day in bed. It was languorous and passionate. We ate free ‘home made’ cookies given to us when we checked in. We left the hotel briefly to buy fried chicken. We looked at the pool but didn’t swim.

After he left I walked on my own through a huge discount mall, I saw vibrant, sequined dressed for unplanned Quinceanera.

On the way home I wondered what the ham hocks would taste like that had been slowly cooking in the stove all day. They were delicious.

I have, of late, developed sexual desires and needs formally ignored. Today my legs are weak from indulging myself.

I may drive to NYC next week to fetch the art that remains in the East Village. Dan has been looking after it.

I like driving across country. I should take a different route but the familiarity of Route 66 lures me south.

I spoke at an ACLU event last week in the lush Hancock Park gardens of a rich gay man. His large mock Tudor home filled with Arts and Crafts furniture and paintings by dead artists like Otto Dix. Even though there were many sofas and well upholstered club chairs there didn’t seem to be anywhere to sit.

The speech was well received.

One afternoon last week (May 1st) I spoke to David Cruz, the KTLK liberal chat show host. I felt primed and confident. It was easier to talk about the LA jail system than it was to talk about Dorian Gray. Ethnic Cleansing. Secure Communities. Institutional racism and homophobia.

I have not been to any 12 step meeting but was stopped in the street by the crazy Sean McFarland sex therapist who kissed me and hugged me. I told him that the deaths of his clients should be on his conscience. He wished me all the best and crawled, like the slimy reptile he is, back into the Porsche despair has paid for.

On Saturday I met another 12 step buddy at Gjelina but we didn’t talk much. I don’t want to hear about the cult. Even though he is an old friend I eyed him suspiciously. We talked about my 85-year-old friend Coach who died last week. I’m glad he never knew that I turned by back on AA.

Robby and I had lunch last Thursday. He is delightful.

I have been ignoring calls from people I’m usually happy to hear from.

Everyday I drive along the PCH to Venice where I drink coffee at Intelligentsia on Abbot Kinney. I take pictures of strangers for my portrait project updated daily.

We peered briefly at the Super Moon. It was large and bright. It wasn’t nearly as exciting as seeing the comet, Hale Bop.

For the past ten days I have logged onto gay hook up app Grindr to see what is going on…what I am missing. I’ve been sent many picture of cocks but had no desire to sit on any of them…many pictures of asses but have no need to fuck. Next week I am going to publish them all here on WordPress in a password protected blog.

Yesterday this mad kid (Turkish origin) from Bel Air in Maryland left violent, racist messages on this blog. He used to call and text. He stopped texting and calling months ago after I threatened the police…so he sets up false Facebook accounts and tells me how he is going to kill me etc.

In his head he is best friends with Peres Hilton.

In his head he thinks he can leave anonymous notes…telling me that I am a disgusting negro lover…and not get caught.

Again, what this idiot, these morons don’t get? They leave their IP addresses , they leave crucial evidence. This is his: 68.55.180.249 It is linked to every email he ever sent, every message he ever wrote.

The kid is a tragic mess who needs help…but I ain’t the one to give it to him.

Robby said yesterday, after I texted some sweet note…’till death do us part’. So I reminded him that death was probably not so far off, (more deaths of contemporaries reported in London) that he would one day organize my funeral.

The kid who shot all those Afghans in their own homes last week…well, he is getting a media makeover.

They say he ‘snapped’, he was ‘drinking’, it was his ‘third tour’. Meanwhile whole families are dead.

Can you imagine the same excuses being made if an Afghan slaughtered an American family. Well, he snapped, he was drinking…he couldn’t take it any more.

Could you imagine those excuses being made?

More details are ’emerging’, more details are being manufactured so we can let this guy off the hook.

Meanwhile the tenant I had downstairs, Matty O’Neil…he has gone…leaving a disgusting mess behind him. The boys took a whole day cleaning up after him.

You know, this kid Matty spent time in jail because of his Arab origins? He was held in a jail after 9/11, probably held illegally by the US government…with his father when he was a young boy…yet when I suggested that his story and mine had similarities he told me imperiously, “I am an American! There are no similarities.”

He moved out, brought a motley crew with him. His sister, her girlfriend….his boyfriend.

The girlfriend was Chinese, the only one there with ancient Mayflower/American credentials was Matty’s boyfriend the acutely fay boy who works in the veterinary office in Malibu who Matty met on Grindr.

Deluded, the week before he left he asked me for a membership to the private club I belong to.

It made me smile. How the American children of immigrants quickly forget the struggles of their fathers.

“I pity you.” He said, as he was leaving.

Along with his pity he left two huge stains on the carpet, refused to pay his rent or accept responsibility for the mess…I pity his next landlord.

The dog sleeps by my side, I worry that I might roll on him in the night and kill him. Or, in a dream, I dismember him then wake up and he is dismembered.

As a very young child I worried that I had torn a dress to pieces that belonged to my mother.

I convinced myself that I had stolen the dress from her wardrobe, torn the dress, trying to make it fit me.

The shame of shredding it lived with me for decades. One day, some time in my 40’s, I confessed to her. I told her what I had done. She laughed, the dress had been her sisters, she had returned the dress.

The woolen crepe feel of it, the silk lining, the dark blue flowers lifted like brocade on the darker blue surface. The dream, the scissors, the cutting, trying to make it fit….me.

It was a dream.

You know that every word I write is being read by the police, by the brunette DA? By the ‘victim’s’ lawyers? They trawl this blog for evidence. Did I just prove how ‘dark and creepy’ I really am?

In another dream the DA is wearing suspenders and a bra, panties (crotchless) a wet gash, slipping herself onto her much older husband’s giant cock. She glances at the bible that sits primly on the bedside table and kicks it off. Her ankle bracelet (an anniversary gift) catches the light, her Christian name written in gold.

Another marathon press session yesterday. This time a fearless woman made it up the mountain. Blond, slim, attractive. I asked her who would play her in the movie of her life. Jodi Foster. Good choice.

I often wonder, when I am having an out-of-body experience, out of my life for a moment experience…what the hell is happening?

A four-hour interview. After she left I fell into bed and slept deeply until Kevin arrived. He chauffeured me into Venice, for dinner with Anna at Axe (where I once made a beautiful boy wear agent provocateur underwear and blow me in the bathroom…) We ate everything on the menu: the flat bread and the crab and the boiled beef with polenta. Anna drank a bottle of wonderful white wine, I envied her so much. I wanted to taste it. To feel the effect of the wine on my body and mind. To take a few hours off.

When the sun sets, the nights are chilly, cold enough for a scarf.

After dinner a Mormon arrived from the internet. We could not keep our hands off of each other. I slipped my hands up under his coat onto his warm belly. I kissed him on his lips. He smiled coyly. 28 years in the closet, 28 years yearning for this. Yes, he was the Mormon boy you see dressed in a suit wearing a badge, looking like a talent agent.

He’s out there experimenting, meeting men, feeling his way into a gay life.

At home we fell into bed and I found myself giving into him, becoming uncharacteristically submissive. He came three times. He didn’t lose his erection in between. I couldn’t stop kissing him. I made him mark my neck. I made him bite me.

Sucking the spit out of his mouth. The cum out of his cock.

The twins arrived home at 2.30am. He had long gone.

The silent house. I lay in bed and listened to my breath fill my lungs. Enjoying the sensation of being alive. A sensation I have had often since I left the jail. I have been so alive since they shat me out of the MCJ. Walk through that door and you’ll be free.

The jail has restored my faith in humanity? You wanted to know how so?

Because I met men in there, undeserving black men, paying the price with dignity. Because it made me re-evaluate everything.

(He brought me a bunch of hyacinths, the pungent fragrance fills the room.)

I have met extraordinary men and women since I left the jail. Men and women who restored my faith in America. The USA. Brilliant, humblingly brilliant minds working to free the men I knew (and men like them) from a barbaric life in an American jail.

This is the Newtonian ‘equal and opposite’ reaction to the life I had before I passed imperceptibly into my dotage, my serious…third life.

The people I am meeting, the places I am visiting are so startlingly different from the life you thought I aspired. I find myself in dingy offices down town. Understanding obscure laws. Recasting myself. Relishing the next interview. I am useful at last. I am useful to them. Useful for changing laws, illegal protocols…and people are listening. I am being heard…it feels good.

You see what they did to Julian Assange? They will try to do that to me. They will discredit me. They will try. Scurrilously, meticulously, evidentially. They will tell you that I can’t be trusted. When the moment…that moment we have all been waiting for, the moment before the curtain rises, when the audience hushed, the lights have dimmed.

This morning, Mel picked me up from the mountain at 6.30 am. He drives a large, white Hummer, his dog and my dog are best friends. They are a similar size and their fur is the same colour.

I left a young black internet date in my bed and the twins slumbering downstairs. I wore the Martin Margiela sunglasses Joan bought for me last year and I only removed them when Mel dropped me off 6 hours later.

The last AA meeting I attended was held in the chapel in The Men’s County Jail. The speakers valiantly trying to spread the word whilst 400 tranny hookers caught up on the ‘T’ (gossip). I sat listening to them that Wednesday evening wondering if I would ever go back to AA, whether I would even remain soba when I eventually left the jail.

Last night I poured myself a glass of red wine. I didn’t drink it. I looked at it in the 17C crystal glass, I sniffed it occasionally but I didn’t have the guts to drink it. Just like I have not had the guts to kill myself, even though some of you seem like you’re waiting for me to do so.

Taking a drink is like the first step toward a painful death. Those of you who have not drunk for some time know what I mean.

Perhaps death is the solution? That’s what they promise in the preamble of Narcotics Anonymous: Jails, Institutions, Death.

I have experienced the first two, now I wait patiently for the third.

AA. I committed to it so many years ago. I was so damned willing, so entranced, so desperate. Now, I loathe it. I sat there this morning wishing I was drunk. My lips stained with red wine…preferably a rich Multipulciano. That twisted smile I smiled when I was drunk. Do any of you old friends remember that? That strange half-smile?

I sat there listening to their white, middle-aged, bourgeois stories, stories of their mediocre triumphs and their miserable disasters. Their engagements, their dying wives, their wayward medicated children…reassuring us that they were nothing without AA.

The most bumptious of them all flaying himself before us, describing himself as an arrogant scoundrel. His tearful confession masquerading as humility. Knowing, of course, that his well rehearsed speech would garner rave reviews from his adoring fans. He had, after all, relapsed publicly, he had gotten back on the wagon with the rest of us (even though he had deceived us) he reassured his brethren that ‘we do not shoot our wounded’.

When it was my turn to speak I felt that crooked smile on my lips. As if I were drunk. As if I had already taken the first sip.

They knew where I had been. They looked down their manufactured noses at the hopeless alcoholic who could not stay on the straight and narrow. The ‘arrogant scoundrel’ looked about him at his friends, scoffing, expecting me to prostrate myself before them…begging forgiveness.

Instead, I told them about the tranny hookers, I told them that I had been in resentment since Jake revealed himself. I let them know that the cloud of resentment, loathing, hatred had thickened so it blocked out the sun. I reminded them that, for the longest time, I had forgotten what it felt like to live in the light. I told them to re-read steps four and five and let me be a lesson to them all. Let my story remind them what it looks like when resentment smothers a recovering alcoholic like wisteria a stone house.

I told them that going to jail had been the best thing for me and they nodded and agreed but they had no idea what they were agreeing to.

After I spoke, others with similar ailments, similar pathologies felt able to share. They thanked me, they said that there was a fine line between sobriety and insanity. They reminded the others just how many of us kill ourselves after many years of sobriety. The darkness in men’s souls.

I was envious of those who had killed themselves. I have wanted to be dead for the longest time. I know what some of you will say…like Chris in Sydney and those of you who would prefer it…you would tell me to hurry on and do it. You would say, go on kill yourself, good riddance to you Duncan Roy.

But when the time comes and I hold the pills in my hand like a fist of squirming bugs…something stops me. Something tells me that just one more day and the pain of losing the man/dog/home you love might just diminish.

I may very well have ended my relationship with AA.

My great friend John Adler, my sponsor these past few years in AA and SAA abandoned me a few weeks after I was locked up. Even though his own sponsor is a child molester and child pornographer, even though his wife begged me to get her a club membership, apparently I am a danger to him and his family.

It was a betrayal that I never thought I would have to endure, it was the one and only time I cried in the jail. My best friend was a coward.

He wasn’t the only one.

I learned many lessons in the jail. I learned about America. I learned more when I read the comments posted after the piece published in the online version of The Independent. The difference between the British and the Americans. I was proud to be British yesterday.

For the record, I have to see the doctors tomorrow to work out what we do about three months of medical inaction. God may very well be doing for me what I cannot do for myself. If you know what I mean. The pain in my belly is occasionally overwhelming. It feels like my insides are being ripped out. My kidneys burning. The blood in my urine a daily reminder. A serious situation.

It is more serious than the stupid charges against me, charges I cannot find the time to take seriously. More serious than DA Anne-Marie Wise would want you to believe.

We sat in the deli after the meeting, before the long walk in the canyon, and Michelle Bachman was on the TV. She looks like Anne-Marie, she has that look those women who think they are powerful. Women who work for men believing the glass ceiling has been broken.

She’ll read this and she’ll try and prove how powerful she is…she’ll try and make life difficult, like she did when I was inside the jail, tacking on extra weeks of incarceration before the trial…waiting for me to buckle and except her pathetic ‘deal’.

Do your worst Anne-Marie. Your very worst will not hurt me. You cannot hurt me. You don’t know me.

You should have seen her in the court with her pile of papers, feeling very important.

Fingering that cheap jewelry as if it were Cartier. Taking it all so personally. She probably goes home and tells her children that mummy does very important work putting dangerous men behind bars. Not that she has been colluding with the super rich to steal from the poor.

You see, the resentment overwhelms. It gets me. It bites me in the neck like a vampire. It keep me alive…even though I should be dead.

Before I tell you. Before I make it public. Before I describe the beauty and the beast…before I feed the children, before I take the dog for a walk I want to say thank you.

Firstly, from the bottom of my heart, I want to thank Robby who never missed a visiting day, who sat behind the bullet proof glass and smiled hopefully and never gave up. He tirelessly searched through many, many boxes for essential documents. He put money on my ‘books’ so I could eat decent food. He called friends, wrote emails, paid bills, drove between far-flung offices in different parts of Los Angeles in his windowless Miata delivering those essential documents to essential lawyers.

He answered my calls on a Friday night when most beautiful 21-year-old boys should be out chasing equally beautiful people, places and things.

He never gave up. He never let go. He told me he loved me when I felt unloved. He proved, once and for all, that God exists.

I want to thank Dee and Nicola for their extraordinary generosity by paying my lawyers bills. I want to thank Jason, Jennifer, Anna, Dan, Zelcho and Joan for picking up the phone, for listening, for laughing and caring.

I want to thank Mel for paying the mortgage.

The people on the outside, those good and honorable people complimented those I shared the majority of time inside the Men’s County Jail. The men who convinced me that everything would work out. The men who taught me how to play Cribbage, Spades and Feral (my brain REFUSED to learn Pinocle) and made me join in when all I really want to do was sleep away the day. Every day.

I want to thank my convicted friends Ivan and Steve, two men my age who sat with me daily (like the council of elders) laughing gently at the antics of the young.

1.

So it began…

The day I was arrested in early November 2011 heralded the beginning of the end of possibly the worst two years of my life.

The end of the mid-life crisis that had well exceeded its sell by date. It was the end of the madness that had determined far too many bad choices.

A series of catastrophic decisions made after the The Big Dog was torn up in front of me: a relationship with a man who could not possibly give me what I needed and from whom I should have run as fast as I was able…as soon as he revealed the truth about himself. An appearance on a TV show that merely underpinned the rancid thoughts I had brewing about my self.

Finally the reason, that reason…the reason I cannot explain at this particular moment because the lawyers have told me to keep my big mouth shut and on this occasion I have agreed.

This morning at 3am, after a 6 hour wait, I pulled on the musty clothes I had stowed in a clear plastic bag nearly three months before, from a different year.

For the first time in 3 months my arms were covered. My legs felt warm. My feet enclosed in fur-lined Marc Jacobs boots rather than flopping around in Chinese, black cotton pumps.

The glass door behind which I had been escorted and left, changed out of my baby blue smock and elasticated pants. On that door the deputy had written in clumsy, black letters K6G.

I was on my own. On my own for the first time in 3 months. I could take a shit on my own. I didn’t.

I pulled on the black knitted Ralph Lauren cardigan. It smelt as it looked.

Opposite me, a similar room crammed mostly with Mexican immigrants. Pulling on their terrible street wear. Their grinning, greasy, fat faces pressed up against the glass. They knew what I was, they had seen me in the distinctive costume, they knew what K6G meant. I stared back at them. I wasn’t afraid.

I had not expected to be released. The narrative I had long accepted included: 4 more months in Men’s County Jail, a further 6 months at a Santa Ana Immigration center and a lengthy deportation. I had long given up on ever seeing my home, my dog, my view…ever again.

This was the judgement of my expensive but woefully inadequate immigration attorney. Imminent catastrophe. God, as it turns out, had other plans.

Frustrated by their miserable prognosis I set about firing them and contacted the Esperanza Immigrant Rights Project. A Catholic organization run by two super smart, compassionate women and paid for by the Mexican Government.

I had my first meeting with them two weeks ago. They made representation last Friday. Today I was released from the immigration hold that had polaxed me these past three months.

Of course there were people who were very happy that I had been arrested. Thrown into jail. I was told that some were gleeful when I was arrested. “He’s going down!” they screamed.

I have no idea when this will end. No release in sight. No plea deal. No, no, no.

Perhaps I will never see the Ocean from my mountain ever again? The abrupt loss of life, like a suicide, coming here is like committing suicide. I cannot imagine, dare not imagine returning to that glittering life.

The dream of some future is dashed.

2.

I was arrested on the PCH. I can’t tell you why. You’ll have to find out for yourself. All in good time…more will be revealed.

All I can tell you is this: I was arrested and charged, when I attempted to bail out I was told that due to an ‘immigration hold’ I was to be kept in custody. Sent to jail. I made frantic phone calls, I cried until my face was wet.

At that very moment the line would be drawn between those friends who were able to help and those who turned their back.

After being processed like a bad meat pie out of The Hidden Hills Police Station they drove us to the jail. They took the scenic route. They drove along the PCH, past Tom’s house, David’s mansion, The Malibu Inn where I had watched Pink perform a few nights after I met her.

They drove the same route I had driven many, many times since I had moved to Malibu in 2007. I was in the back of the police bus looking at the hazy dawn, the rising sun over the ocean. The greasy waves flopping lazily over the sand.

They picked up other newly arrested men from an assortment of locations all over Los Angeles.

Those first few days away from home were unpleasant but, thankfully, I remained teachable. I knew that the harder I struggled the deeper the hook. I sat behind my eyes, doing as I was told. Finally, after hours in the bus, we were processed into the jail. A theatrical experience designed to frighted and malign.

“Look at the floor.” they screamed. I looked briefly into the blue eyes of the startlingly handsome officer. He growled, “Don’t look at me.” It was hard not to eroticize his demand.

Flipping from aggressor to victim.

We were given sandwiches and told to sit on metal benches. Nothing you can do will hurt me. You cannot hurt me.

We were interviewed. “Are you gay or suicidal?” He asked. I knew that I hadn’t lied about my gayness, not now or ever. The moment I told him I was gay I was torn from the line, the general population. My name called out. “Roy 066!” A huge black deputy cut off my wrist band, looking spitefully at me. “Gay?” he spat. I nodded. He attached another band to my wrist.

A yellow wrist band, it said: K 6 G.

My life in jail would now be as different as my life on the streets.

Another few days of being ‘processed’. Peered at, prodded, questioned. Many men opted for the gay dorm, straight men, but few achieved their aim.

The straight men want to fuck the convincing trans boys. The straight men didn’t want the ‘politics’. The ‘politics’ in the California jail and prison system means living in the racially divided dorm. If you are black you speak only with the blacks, if you are white or latino you do the same. If you are caught fraternizing with a black, latino or white (or those who have chosen with whom they will run) you’ll get beaten, stabbed or worse.

Even if you know people on the streets…your best friend even…your affiliations mean nothing, could be deadly. You keep to your own.

Sadly, this racial divide is perfectly mirrored on the ghetto streets of Los Angeles. If you weren’t a racist before you went to jail or prison you’ll be one when you leave. Lessons learned, not easily unlearned. Tattoos on face and neck. Tattooed collars, graphic letters…numbers on sculls and forearms. Boys become men when they hold a gun, shoot a stranger, murder their enemies…BK=Black Killer.

I didn’t experienced the ‘straight’ dorm so I can’t tell you what it feels like to make others invisible because of the colour of the skin. I can tell you however, that the majority of the white men I met in the gay dorm were despicable, homeless freaks. Consequently, I hung with my new black buddies. Most of whom, incidentally, had been co-opted into gangs as young children.

When I arrived they were suspicious, when I left the dorm yesterday evening they surrounded me and held me and cried.

When it was time to settle down and open my bunk to another man it wasn’t a white man I chose.

In the observation tank I met my first latino ‘green lighter’. He was hiding. In organized crime, gang and prison slang to green-light a person is to authorize his assassination. Jose. We talked for hours. I found him very desirable. He told me that someone had once paid him 3o bucks for a blow job.

After a harrowing day or so in the vilest of cells waiting to be officially classified as gay they take me to a small office and a distinguished senior officer interviews me. The officer tries to determine how gay I really am. “Which gay bars do you go to?” He looks at me suspiciously when I tell him that I don’t drink. I tell him that I make gay films. “Porn?” he chuckles. Finally, I am determined as a convincing homosexual. My dark blue ‘straight’ uniform removed, exchanged for a pale blue ‘gay’ uniform…I am sent to the relative safety of the gay dorm. Dorm 5300.

Nowhere where there are deputies is anyone gay…safe. I have abandoned my cloak of invisibility. They can see exactly what I am. The deputy whispers threateningly, “You gays have a sick life style.” He can’t say it loudly. They can’t beat us, not like they used to…not since the controversial undercover FBI sting that lead to the end of ritual beatings and institutionalized homophobia.

The night I arrived I watched the flat screen TV Robert Downey Junior had bought the gay dorms after his stint at The County Jail. The inmates watch Law and Order. CSI. Anything by Tyler Perry. By the time I left 5300 I had watched everything Tyler Perry had ever made. He makes really bad films.

The gay white boys had Supreme White Power written on their alabaster bodies. They had badly drawn pictures of Norse Gods. Claiming their white supremacist, Odinist heritage whilst fucking chocolate coloured trannies.

The tranny hookers, the homeless white boys, the squabbling couples who indulged nightly in domestic violence.

I watched in awe as a young man, caught by his fierce tranny wife fucking another ‘girl’, throw a chair through the flat screen TV bought by Robert Downey Junior.

I knew that I had to keep my mouth shut. I had to learn quickly. I listened. I learned.

Statistically, there is more violence in the gay population (inmate against inmate) than in the rest of the 6000 plus general population.

3.

When they finally slept I walked between the serried bunks.

If I stroll between the bunks at dawn I remember what it is like to be at home in England. I can smell the sea, the shingle on the beach crunching under foot, wrapped up warm against the bitter easterly winds, just me and The Little Dog. We don’t need anyone else. Did I tell you how much he loves the snow? Leaping carelessly into the great drifts.

One day I will see you again England. I will walk gratefully in the rain, on the London streets and country lanes. If I am able (if I can get back to you) they will drop us at the edge of the valley and we will walk to the house, past the stream where we would play, the pasture, the forest of rhododendrons, along the drive flanked by ancient Douglas Fir.

The door will open and they will be pleased to see me, hug me, feed me. They will let me sleep until I am recovered.